Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋

@Blaze @ada @fediverse There is a small number of personal PDSes, plus Bridgy's one: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses, but right now there aren't really any public open-signup ones, because they're limiting them to 10 users per PDS in this phase (I mean you can create more, but they won't be seen by the Bluesky relay). They implied that the network/software is not yet ready for this yet at this point, because a lot of things are still in flux (e.g. they're adding OAuth now).

@BeAware @Blaze @fediverse There's a small number of self-hosted personal PDSes (https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses), but the system isn't really open yet to running larger ones with open signup. The Bluesky Relay doesn't currently accept more than 10 users on one PDS (with exceptions like Bridgy).

Technically anyone can run a parallel Relay and/or AppView, and hopefully that will happen, but nobody has done it yet so far (Whitewind/Frontpage are kind of different services on the same protocol).

@BeAware @Blaze @fediverse Yeah, so it's not a bad explanation, maybe a bit biased ;)

The key is that the architecture is very different, and there isn't a direct equivalent of instances. There are PDSes, but they do much less than Fedi instances, and they also don't directly talk to (federate with) each other. The data flows from PDSes to relay(s) to AppView(s) and to clients.

@ericjmorey @doomsdayrs No, it's actually extremely clear that it is temporary…

@BeAware @xnx @fediverse I'm with you on this one, I think it's important to eventually have non-Bluesky-owned infrastructure alternatives even if a lot of people don't care about it… I hope we'll get there

@hoshikarakitaridia @Blaze @fediverse I think the main reason is that this solves a lot of UX problems that Fedi has because of its architecture, things like:

- thread comments, like counts, follower lists not being consistent between instances
- not being able to easily interact with content that's not already cached on your instance
- user/post search not working globally, for the same reason

On Bluesky, the AppView indexes all that, and you load threads, feeds and do search through there.

@xnx @ccoremapd @fediverse It was an unofficial term until recently, but they seem to be adopting it a bit more officially right now, see e.g. here https://atproto.com and in the "Glossary" section. But I think this will stay a developer-targeted term, I don't think they'll use it in such context as "Sign in with your ATmosphere account" (but they don't really dictate to third parties right now how they should phrase this on their side).